


Permafrost

by epistolic



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-09
Updated: 2013-01-09
Packaged: 2017-11-24 07:02:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/631724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/epistolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>007 is a cold-blooded killer, except when he isn’t.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Permafrost

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Deutsch available: [Dauerfrost](https://archiveofourown.org/works/656024) by [eurydike](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eurydike/pseuds/eurydike)



It is -28°C in Harbin when Q locates Bond’s apartment and knocks on the door.

There’s a long, strategic pause. Q can imagine what Bond is doing – thumbing the safety off of a handgun, aligning himself with the doorjamb, as sleek and as careful as a cat.

“It’s me,” Q says to the closed door. “It’s Q.”

The door is opened a crack. A sliver of Bond’s body appears: one single, ice-blue eye.

Q is freezing his arse off. The parka he’s wearing is letting in the wind and it’s as if a million thin-bladed knives are stabbing him all over. He’s starting to suspect he can’t feel his toes. Bond is wearing single layers; fucking insane. But then Q realises that the air seeping out from Bond’s apartment is warm, much warmer than it should be, and he almost sways forward right into Bond’s chest.

“Bloody hell,” Q says. “Aren’t you going to let me in?”

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Bond tells him.

Q hikes his black carry-all higher up on his shoulder. “Neither are you. What’s that smell?”

“Green curry,” Bond says. Q resists the urge to wedge an elbow against the door and push it the rest of the way open. It’s frustrating, not being able to see the other half of Bond’s silhouette; you can never tell what that other half is doing. “You’re not coming in.”

“Why not?”

Bond shifts. Frustration flicks across his face. “Q. This is my apartment.”

“Sure,” Q says. “And you’ve never been inside my apartment either. Especially not that last time, when you bled all over my new upholstery.” He looks down, stamps the slush off his boots. “Let me in.”

“What are you even doing here? I thought 006 had you tied up with that assignment in Borneo.”

“Well,” Q says. “I’m obviously not in Borneo.”

Bond looks at him. 

They have a small battle of wills on the doorstep, staring each other down.

Halfway through, something hot spikes its way through Q’s body, like a quick jolt of fire.

For a moment he stands there, stunned. He catalogues the damage. Heat has crept up into his cheeks. He is warm, all the way down to the tips of his fingers. He is aware of how his breath fogs as it leaves his mouth; aware, for the first time, of the temperature of his own body.

The expression on Bond’s face hasn’t altered. It’s cool and just a little bit patronising.

“Fine,” Q says. A part of him is still scrambling to recover; he turns on his heel. “I’ll find myself a hotel.”

\--

Q detests the cold.

He is not here because he wants to be. Every week Q spends at least forty hours wishing that Bond would stop getting himself into trouble. There is always another Columbian drug cartel, always a coup just about to happen, always a rogue sniper gunning for 007’s head. Give Bond another year or so, and there won’t be a single country in the world willing to have him inside her borders; not a single major city that Bond hasn’t slept and slaughtered through, left his fingerprints upon.

Once upon a time, Q didn’t give a damn. A year ago, maybe. A year and a half.

Now here Q is, hunched over in a curb-side eatery while a blizzard rages about outside.

At about a quarter past ten, Bond slides into the empty seat opposite Q. There is snow caught in Bond’s cap and his hair; Q can pick out each individual eyelash, frosted with fresh ice from Bond’s breath.

The cap comes off and Bond shakes the snow onto the floor. “Still here?”

“Still here,” Q says. “Unfortunately.”

“Should I even bother asking how you knew I was here in the first place?”

“Well,” Q says, poking reluctantly at the rest of his breakfast. “It depends on whether or not you’re expecting an answer. If you are, then I wouldn’t really recommend it.”

“You might as well just tell me what it is that you want.”

“Somebody followed you here,” Q says. Then he bristles when Bond looks pointedly at him. “Not me. Someone else. Evidently.”

“I don’t see how that’s an answer to my question.”

“You didn’t even _ask_ a question.”

“As far as I’m aware,” Bond says, “MI6 is not in the habit of sending high-level personnel across the globe to deliver messages. I’m sure you know of the existence of the mobile phone.”

Q purses his mouth. “That’s what I said to M, but he wouldn’t listen. So here I am.”

“You didn’t even put up a fight?”

“You know who I am. Of course I put up a fight. I see enough of your irritating person while I’m at work, I’d prefer not to see more of your irritating person while I’m supposed to be on holiday.”

The side of Bond’s mouth quirks a little. “Ah. Of course.”

There is grease all over the table-top. Q realises, belatedly, that it must be getting all over his sleeve.

“You’re going to catch a cold,” Bond says finally, nodding at the admittedly inadequate parka Q has draped over his chair. “It’s easy to get sick over here, what with all the heating indoors and the snow outside. I do hope you had the sense to pack something warmer.”

“Why?” Q demands. “Are you expecting me to stay?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Bond says, and looks at him steadily. “Are you?”

\--

“Here,” Bond says.

There is a heavy black coat in Bond’s hand. Q eyes it suspiciously, half-expecting it to sprout spikes or start spitting some sort of poison at him.

Q still hasn’t taken the chain off of his hotel door.

“It isn’t going to bite you,” Bond tells him after a moment. “It’ll keep the snow and the wind out. And you need to stop wearing those earmuffs, they look ridiculous and they won’t keep you warm. Your boots, too, not enough grip. Too much ice around here. You’ll fall over and break your tailbone.”

“You shouldn’t be worrying about me,” Q says. “You should be worrying about – ”

“I’m protecting Her Majesty’s assets,” Bond says. Q reaches out and hesitantly takes the coat, manoeuvres it over the latched chain. “Same as you, yes?”

“Yes. I suppose.”

“Good.” Bond nods curtly at him, turns to go.

“Wait a minute,” Q blurts out. Bond pauses. “I’ve got something for you too.”

The centre of Q’s hotel room has turned into a labyrinth. There are computer screens everywhere; whiteboards and stacks of paper, pens separated from their lids, a spooling length of yarn. A splotch of blue ink on the carpet from where Q accidentally chewed through one of the pens two days ago. Three unwashed takeout containers, one still with food in it. Several precariously-placed cups of tea. Wires and telephone lines stretched all over the place, like a chaotic net.

Bond puts a shoulder to the latched door and busts it open, tearing the chain right out of its bracket.

“Good God,” Bond says. He looks down, nudges a stray sock out of the way with his foot. “Your room looks as if a tornado hit it. Or perhaps a nuclear war.” 

“I’ve got a USB stick in here somewhere,” Q says.

“It might take you a year or two to find it,” Bond says.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Q says. He navigates around his laptop – nearly trips over a LAN line, because as luck would have it, his room does not have Wi-Fi – shifts a whiteboard out of the way. “At most it’ll take me a week or two. I hope you’re not in a hurry to be somewhere.”

Bond settles himself into the nearest armchair. “No hurry at all.”

\--

The woman on the screen – a svelte, doe-eyed blonde – winds an arm into the crook of Bond’s elbow and smiles up at him. It’s a sly, brilliant smile, all smoke and mirrors.

Bond smiles back.

Q dunks a sugar cube into his tea with a little more force than necessary.

If there’s one way in through 007’s defences, Q has decided, it’s a beautiful woman. Over the past year Q has had to listen to Bond seduce his way past every obstruction imaginable. Bond fells women like a lesser man would fell dominos. It isn’t something Q has had much experience in – Q’s problems are much more concrete, and it’s difficult to seduce a line of computer code, even if you tried.

He watches as Bond leans in to whisper something into the woman’s ear.

There’s an effortless ease to everything Bond does. It’s not enough for him to save the world – he has to look as if saving the world is an afterthought. After a gruelling day in the field, Bond is the type to swan back into headquarters with every ounce of charm intact. But look closely, and you’ll see something cold underneath the charm; something brutal, something almost reptilian there in between the cracks, like looking into the eyes of a snake. 

No other agent in the history of MI6 has left so much collateral damage behind. His file is a scrolled backlog of bodies: stabbed, shot, strangled, drowned, burned alive.

In all likelihood, this woman – whoever she is – will end up dead in a snowdrift somewhere.

But that’s just it. There’s something about James Bond that makes you want to play the odds. When Q had helped Bond lead Silva to Scotland, he’d felt it: that hot bolt out of the blue that had whispered at him, in a siren’s voice, _perhaps_.

Q snaps his laptop shut.

\--

“If this is your idea of a stake-out,” Bond says, looking down at him, “then I have to say it rather defeats the purpose if your subject knows about it.”

Q glares. It’s raining outside and all Q can really focus on is how miserable he is going to be in an hour’s time, when it all freezes over. He’s been combing through security footage for the entire morning, including stolen airport footage; both his eyes are swollen.

“You couldn’t have picked a better place, could you,” Q snaps. “You just had to pick _here_.”

“I like it here,” Bond says.

“There are about a million places in the world where the temperature is at least above zero.”

Bond shrugs at him, insufferable as always. “But then I wouldn’t have the pleasure of watching you sit here with your nose about to freeze off your face. Is your hair wet?”

“Yes.”

“You should dry it.”

“Yes, thank-you,” Q says, cattily. “Your advice is sincerely unappreciated, so if you have nothing better to do, 007, then I suggest you go and shove – ”

“Here.” Bond drops Q’s USB into his lap unceremoniously. “I came to give this back.”

“I believe that’s the first piece of equipment you’ve ever returned to me without any scorch marks.”

“Don’t keep counting on it,” Bond tells him. The curve of Bond’s spine is a graceful dip as he lowers himself to the carpet next to Q. “Every time I wash my hair I can never be bothered waiting for it to dry. I just go outside and once it freezes, I comb out the ice. It never takes more than a minute. You should try it sometime.”

“Actually,” Q says, “there’s this new invention that’s really very handy. It’s called a hairdryer.”

“Never heard of it,” Bond says.

Q looks up to snip out some withering insult but then he notices that there’s a smile on Bond’s face. It’s a dry, sideways smile, all bare branches like the snow-pelted trees outside his window; Q looks down again.

“That’s because you’re technologically deficient,” Q says, which is as mild as his insults come.

“Not like you,” Bond says. “Remotely tracking Marcus Giannino across half the continent.”

“I’m just getting started, actually,” Q says. He pulls up another camera feed: all the toll-gates installed at the start and the end of Harbin’s major highways. “I can do much better than _tracking_ , when I’m not worried about getting hypothermia.”

“It’s not really that bad,” Bond says. “The temperature. You get used to it.”

“I don’t think I ever could.”

“You haven’t been here long enough. I have. It takes some time, that’s all.”

Q looks over at him. Now that Q thinks about it properly, it fits. Bond slots into the winter landscape as easily as white slots into white; harsh, cruel, tempting, but visibly dangerous.

This isn’t a place that Q can navigate – this isn’t a map he understands.

Bond’s thigh is deceptively warm next to Q’s knee. “So. What are we going to do, quartermaster?”

“About Giannino?”

“About the state of your hair.”

“For God’s sake,” Q says, propelling himself off of the carpet, “if it’s so damn distracting, I’ll go and find a towel. In the meantime, you can make yourself useful. Go put the kettle on.”

\--

They end up on the other side of the Songhua River, getting shot at.

It’s not even dinnertime. That’s the thing about being within five miles of James Bond: one moment you’re strolling along the riverbank watching the tourists ice-skate, and the next moment, one of those tourists starts enthusiastically trying to put a bullet into your head.

“Get behind me,” Bond shouts at Q, which is just bloody ridiculous.

Q shoulders his way to Bond’s side. “Don’t just stand there hollering. Give me a _gun_ , for God’s sake. Don’t you have at least five on your person at all times, hidden in your sock or somewhere? Come on.”

“Are you going to accidentally shoot me with it?”

“Oh, shut up,” Q says.

“Here.” Bond reaches down, slaps a fruit knife into Q’s palm.

“Shit, what am I supposed to do with _this_ – ”

“Just stand there and look intimidating,” Bond says. A spray of bullets forces them to duck behind a road barrier; Bond swerves back out, crouching, fires off several shots before pulling back.

“Why don’t you just give me a toothpick and be done with it,” Q mutters. 

“No sarcasm while I’m trying to save our necks,” Bond says.

Four hours later they’re huddling beneath the arch of a bridge in the middle of Zhaolin Park. It’s a clear night. The stars look as if they’ve been sprayed into the sky. Ice rises up in great, lit statues, swans and dragons, goddesses and kings, the swooping planes and curves of frozen palaces; from the naked branches of trees hang ice lanterns, with tiny candles wavering inside their icy shells. 

Q shivers. Bond is bleeding straight through his coat and generally making a huge mess.

“Ironic,” Bond says groggily. “The whole reason I got you out today was to show you this place. And now we’re here. Though the blood loss spoils the mood a bit.”

“We can’t stay here,” Q says. “You need medical attention. My hotel – ”

“No. Compromised.”

“Well, we can’t bloody well stand here on this river until you keel over, 007, or weren’t you aware – ”

“Here.” Bond fumbles about in a coat pocket, reels out a key. “My apartment.”

A part of Q – the small, niggling part; the part always trying to prove itself – wants to say that this is technically all Bond’s fault. There are scans that Q can perform, camera sweeps. There are safeguards. 

But Bond had dragged Q out of the house before he’d even been able to turn his laptop on.

“You do realise,” Q starts to say; then he looks down at where the blood in Bond’s coat has frozen into great, crimson chunks. 

“Never mind,” Q says.

\--

The inside of 007’s apartment is not what Q had imagined at all.

The place is tiny, cramped, dusty in the crevices and along the line of store cupboards. An electric heater wheezes next to the kitchen door. The windows have been taped shut. The floor is a patchwork linoleum that somebody has nailed into place; Q scuffs the edge of it with a shoe and it flakes off. The fridge, mysteriously, has been installed next to the front door, along with a wall calendar that is at least five years old. The furniture is all mismatched. A battered-looking British flag has been made into a curtain in the living room.

Q tries to tug the curtain closed and the entire thing comes off its rung. Q has to stand on a folding chair by the TV in order to hang it back up.

There are no photographs. There are no random firearms lying about. 

The heat is suffocating.

Bond is passed out in his own bed; there are several makeshift stitches in his left side, two or three towels taped to his shoulder in lieu of a bandage. Q had taken Bond’s advice and combed the blood-shards directly out of his hair – scattered them onto the carpet like needles, where they are still thawing out.

A clock that is running in the wrong time zone ticks loudly on the wall.

Q knows about the apartment that Bond has in London: sterile, cold, and sleek. It is an apartment that could belong to anyone. It is a place in which anybody could live.

Since it is winter, the night drains slowly from the sky. Q is not stupid enough to stand by the window, but he sits on a rickety chair in the kitchen and imagines it. The slow blinking-out of the stars. The cupped moon, nestled in a bank of cloud. The gentle movement of all things, the sun and the seasons, the shift of the earth.

Bond’s blood, when it had first coated Q’s palm, had been hot.

\--

“Before you ask,” Q says, nine hours later, “I threw out the methylated spirits. I’m fairly certain you’re not supposed to be drinking that stuff anyway. No wonder you look forty years older than you are.”

“I don’t look like I’m eighty,” Bond says. 

Q helps him sit up, propping a pillow behind his back. “Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

“Every day.”

“I would’ve thought you’d be able to afford something better. It doesn’t quite suit your style.”

Bond slopes a smile at him. “What, my face?”

“Your liquor.”

“I wasn’t aware that I had any particular style.”

“You know,” Q says, tucking in a loose bit of towel. “Fast cars. Fancy suits. Beautiful women. The best technology that money can’t buy, due solely to the genius of your quartermaster.”

For a moment Bond just sits there. It’s almost dawn and the heating creaks in the pipes. A tired note has leaked into James Bond’s shoulders; the bandages make him look lopsided, make him look his age. 

“I’m not who you think I am,” Bond says finally.

“Then who are you?”

“You don’t want to know.”

Q tries very hard not to get pissed off at this and fails. “007. I gave up two whole weeks of my end-of-year holiday to sit here in this bloody blizzard with you. I took a _flight_ , for God’s sake. It was the most miserable twelve hours of my life. It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow and instead of sitting at home with a nice pot of tea and a circuit-board, I’m dodging around in below zero temperatures getting shot at. I don’t think you get to tell me what I want and do not want to know.”

“I told you at the start,” Bond says. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“No,” Q says. “I’m supposed to be at home, but since M is a rather sadistic nutcase – ”

“Are you sure?” Bond cuts in. “Because Moneypenny contacted me last night. Apparently, my quartermaster is missing. Nobody knows where he’s gone. Not even M.”

“M doesn’t tell Moneypenny everything.”

“No. So I contacted M myself. Just to make sure.”

Q plucks at a loose thread on Bond’s sheet and says nothing.

“So naturally I’ve been wondering,” Bond says. “Nobody sent you here. Obviously you don’t want to be here. So why – ”

“I could ask the same of you,” Q interrupts sharply. “You lent me a coat. You’ve been following me everywhere the moment I set foot in this place. Last night you almost knocked me over trying to get me out of the line of fire. Nobody asked you to protect me, 007 – if anything, I’m just slowing you down.”

“You’re not slowing me down. You gave me that USB.”

Q snorts. “Rudimentary surveillance. Any hacker with a secondary school education could have gotten that for you. You don’t need me.”

“Well, you know my style,” Bond says, smiling dryly. “Can’t resist a pretty face.”

“Don’t hide behind that.”

There’s a pause. And then Bond’s eyes turn hard. “I’m not hiding anything, Q.”

“You are. Maybe you’re not aware of it. But I think you know exactly what’s going on, you’re just ignoring it, like the dim-witted sod you are. Is that what they’re teaching you agents nowadays? Adapt and move on? Bury your head in the sand?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bond says.

“Don’t you?”

Q forms a fist and knocks it, heavily, against Bond’s breastbone.

“You keep pretending that you don’t have a heart, 007,” Q says. “But you’re not fooling anyone. And you’re absolutely not fooling _me_.”

\--

It is difficult to imagine Harbin in the spring.

Here, in winter, you can take a piece of wet string outside and before you’ve twirled it twice around, it will have frozen solid. You breathe and you expect to exhale a shatter – you expect ice to spray out instead of air. A century ago this place was a refuge for White Russia; these aristocrats, retreating in the face of the Revolution, built their homes, built their towering cathedrals and their great spires; they huddled down in this cold and formidable place and they dreamed, slept, ate, fucked, died. They were driven out by the Japanese and then the Japanese, too, left. This is a place in which the borders shift; in which territories change hands, over and over; in which maps are never certain.

In the spring, Harbin is transformed. Day by day, hour by hour, it is reborn.

\--

Q is packing and on his way to the airport when Bond materialises in his hotel room.

“I’m sorry I didn’t let you into my apartment when you first got here,” Bond says, out of the blue. “I suppose you took me by surprise. It wasn’t anything personal.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Q says. “I got to see it after all.”

“Even though it took two bullet-wounds and a concussion for me to let you in.”

“Why, are you regretting it?”

“I didn’t say that,” Bond says. 

Q adjusts his glasses higher up on his nose. Miraculously, his hotel room is still intact: no carpets torn up by errant Italian gangsters, no windows smashed. He bends down and plucks a cord out of the nearest monitor, begins to wind it around his fingers.

“Are you going to come back here the same time next year?” Q says, casual.

“Maybe. I haven’t quite decided yet.”

“If you do, I’ll find you.” Q drops the cord into his carry-all. “Unless you have any objections.”

“You still have the key to my apartment,” Bond reminds him.

“Do you want it back?”

Bond’s mouth twitches up and he leans against the doorjamb. “I thought you hated this place.”

“Yes,” Q says. “You’re right. I did.”

Bond watches him for a long moment. There is something passing through Bond’s eyes; Q can’t quite tell what it is. Bond is still sloping a little to the left, guarding the wound in his side, and for the first time Q finds that he looks soft; open; warm-blooded.

“I think that people can change,” Q says at last.

“Yes,” Bond agrees, quiet. The bleak sunlight drapes in through the door. “It can’t always be winter.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back from hiatus! Phew. I hope you all had a lovely holiday and a brilliant New Year, and that 2013 is good to you!
> 
> This fic kind-of makes me sdjfiglsfjgisg because it's 1am and I'm just sick of staring at it, honestly, I do hope it's okay. After two weeks of not writing these characters I feel this weird desperation to write them, but then this sort of inward panic, because I'm scared that I've forgotten _how_ to write them. Fingers crossed, I guess?
> 
> Also I apologise - I haven't actually been to Harbin myself, any and all description is garnered from Wikipedia and my grandma. Please do forgive if anything isn't accurate /o\
> 
> Any and all feedback is much appreciated! For updates on any future fics, feel free to add me on [LiveJournal](http://epistolic.livejournal.com) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/epistolic)! ♥


End file.
